Posts

Nice post on why you should read blogs at work. Actually I was quite surprised we need a post on this topic. I would say: of course you read blogs (and other information) at work! Apparently some people need to be convinced... And I hope they are after reading this post.

On the Intranetblog I recently bumped into "The Good to Great Matrix. Key Factors for Intranet Success". Being a big 'Good to Great' fan (book by Jim Collins) and because I like to read up on Intranet, I was curious what this matrix would bring us. Well, it's definitely worth your time if you like to think about Intranet improvement! The matrix was developed by Toby Ward, "based on real experience with intranets or organizations with an average of 5000 employees".Well, what do you get? It gives you a list of "success factors", such as "design", "layout", "governance" and tells you what a good and great intranet will show in these areas.I'll give you a few examples from the matrix, focusing only on great intranets, of course...:with respect to "content", great intranets have "web-trained writers". Although I agree with most cells in the matrix, I was surprised by this one. If, as another cha…

As promised I would let you know what my experiences are with Twine. Basically not much. I really took a good look at it in the beginning, but could find out how it would fit in my work. I couldn't just drop my work documents there. I stuff I do outside work doesn't fit there at all.So, in the end I didn't up using it much. I'm still listening to the Twine users and hoping to hear from them how I can integrate it in my work life.I do find that Twine could mean a lot in the enterprise. I would be wonderful to drop all my stuff in their, have Twine find interesting related documents, bookmarks and people, connect to people that work on related stuff, etc. Maybe we can try this in the near future?

While reading this post about wiki collaboration an idea popped up. I am secretary of a couple of meetings. This means I have to write minutes. These minutes are quite formal, written in a template, published with approval and distributed. But before they are distributed I regularly have to ask several meeting participants if I correctly jotted down their point.
Well, here's my idea. Wouldn't it be nice if everyone at the meeting had a Google Document of a wiki page in front of him/her? The secretary would have primary responsibility for the minutes. But all other can read along, change and extend the minutes. This makes things must nicer for the secretary and by reading along with the minutes the meeting will hopefully keep to the agenda (point).
Or is somebody already doing this? If so, what are your experiences? And if nobody is doing this, what do you think of this idea?

Richard Dennison just shared a case study that was done for BT on how they use social media. If you follow Richard's blog you won't read anything new, but this case study does sum it all up nicely.What I was wondering though is: Do they help their users/customers decide where to share and store information? With all these tools, it can become hard for them to choose the right tool! I’m working on an internal document to do just this. And I’ll share it with you soon.

About FWS projectWe started with a short presentation about the FWS project by Robert Slagter. More information can be found here.

Showcase Enterprise Social software IBMThen Erik Krischan of IBM gave an overview of what IBM is doing internally with social media. If you follow Luis Suarez, e.g., you already know they’re doing A LOT in this area. It was nice to get an overview of this from Erik. Here’s my notes:He wanted to give a brief introduction and flavor of wha…

James Robertson of the Column Two blog has a very interesting post on "Staff Directories benefit from Cross-Linking" In short (you should read the whole post!) it says to cross-link your internal staff directory as much as possible and it also tells you how to do this.
I completely agree with this point. At the company I work for we also did this in our old people directory too. Regrettably it was replaced by a less-linked one. We’re working on getting the more cross-linked people directory back. Another example of cross-linking is ‘people > expertise’. We added that in our old version too. That gave very interesting results. Finally, this can also be extended outside the company. The internal directory then becomes a CRM-ish tool.

It's been a while ago since I found this, however I didn't have time to listen to it until yesterday... An interesting talk by Tim O'Reilly on Publishing in the new Web 2.0 world. Really interesting to hear how his company, a book publishing company, is keeping up with this new world and how traditional (paper) and modern (digital/web) publishing complement each other.

Sometimes you run into an article that just blows you away. (Thanks for the pointer Lilia!) That's what happened to me while reading Clive Thompson's NYT article "Brave New World of Digital Intimacy". The article is very long, but super informative and gripping. It's about online social networks, especially Facebook and Twitter. I find everybody should read it! The article questions why and how people use these tools. It basically answers the question with: You have to experience it to know. It also questions how real-life social networks relate to digital ones. Why are real-life networks smaller than digital ones and what does this mean for intimacy. I love the terms 'ambient awareness', 'ambient intimacy' and 'ad hoc, self-organizing socializing' to depict these tools. Because it's true, that what I experience too when using Twitter, my blog and Facebook. And I knew real-life networks were limited by the magic number, 150. But I didn…

Interesting poll on Word Processing over at ReadWriteWeb. I must admit I still mostly use MS Word at work. But at home I just Google Docs and OpenOffice more and more. I do find, though, that even within companies, document collaboration will move to the web. And we will be working directly on document content using wiki concepts and stuff like Scribd more and more. Do you agree?

Nice comparison of IT, Operator & Executive, and Social Computing culture on the IBM developerWorks platform. I don't agree with one row though. It says IT finds that "Information can be captured and frozen in time". The Operator & Executive cell has not been filled in. I would say they agree with IT on this topic. Social Computing does not agree with IT on this. According to Social Computing culture information is alive and also co-evolving. Remember?

Interesting article on Techcrunch about "Six Degrees of Separation Is Now Three". And, as we all know and experience, "email and mobile phones were the key factors in reducing the degrees of separation." What I was wondering though is: are we actually also finding answers more quickly than in the 'six degree world'? Is there any research on this topic? Because, if it's true that our separation is diminishing and we are more connected than ever, this should also have some great advantages, right? Or is it just leading to more information (overload)? I think this trend could have really nice consequences. Wouldn't it be nice if you were walking around alone somewhere in a city and you would like to talk to someone on subject x, that your mobile would tell you that such a person is nearby? What (dis)advantages do you see?

An interesting article was published in the July-August 2008 edition of HBR. It was titled "Investing in the IT That Makes a Competitive Difference" and written by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson. It interested me because McAfee is one of the authors - I try to follow his work. Furthermore I was curious what they had to say on the way companies invest in IT. In most large companies the large part of the spending is on large corporate-wide systems, like SAP. And not on an enterprise-wide collaboration tool or corporate intranet, for instance.So, what do they have to say? What I’ll do is summarize the article for you, passing on the highlights. But first a couple of comments:I’msurprised to read they advise companies to define (new) ways of working after deploying a technology platform. I thought we should define our working methods first?I’m surprised they don’t mention PDM/PLM (Product Data Management/Product Lifecycle Management) systems as examples of enterprise softwa…

Olivier Amprimo over at the Headshift blog has a very long and interesting post on "Taxonomies > Sensemaking > Adoption". First of all Olivier points us to Marchand's strategic information alignment framework. This model is pretty well-known. Nonetheless, I took another good look at it after reading Olivier's post and even printed it to hang in on the wall as a constant reminder. Why? Well, Olivier shows us why many innovative IT projects struggle. I advise you to read his whole post, but I'll pass some main points - I hope I got them… - here:In theory, IT policies are to address the four elements evolving in a sequence "manage risks" > "reduce costs" > "add value" > "create new reality". In reality this taxonomy displays two distinct (and often non-compatible) behaviours: - manage risks and reduce costs - add value and create new reality This is a good reminder! This is why the big PDM and ERP projects g…

Often the blogosphere just points you to great posts. Luis Suarez pointed us/me to this great post on email overload on the tfpl blog. It is titled "Breaking the e-mail compulsion". It passes on some interesting facts about email use and addiction. It goes on to give us some good email tips (which I apply already). But what really triggered me was the big question: The challenge that I would like organisations and vendors to address is this:How do we enable colleagues to generate, send and store an important communication about a project within the same application that holds the rest of the documents, communications and information relating to that project?I can't tell you too much, but colleagues of mine addressed this issue and answered this question to a large extent. I pointed to a paper on this work here. And I hope to publish another paper on this topic with them soon. So, keep in touch! "Context" and keeping information "in context" is what it…

An interesting remarks in Ross Dawson's "Review of Day One of Enterprise 2.0 conference":Nigel Watson of Microsoft described the history of blogging at Microsoft, from the early days through to the breadth of blogging across the enterprise that there is today. While I'm familiar with the history, it was good to hear it again. I didn't realize that Microsoft doesn't have an explicit blogging policy, and that Microsoft's general employee policies are seen as sufficient.I knew they had a simple policy like: "Be smart". But this means their policy is even simpler!